ILS EN PARLENT

 

Chris Joe Beard  (former member of "Crozier and Beard"/" Mac Trevor and Joe".......Brittany 1976)

My friend Mike Billington has a small folk record label in Manchester and was a big fan of Trevor Crozier. We have decided to make a tribute album to him using his songs and songs connected with him. I have written a guitar piece called "MacTrevor The Magnicent" and we have recorded this. We have also nearly finished "Trouble Over Bridgwater" and Bob Kerr from The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band will be playing on it. Another two items are ready and some more are being recorded.

 I am hoping to get some more "names" to contribute in the following months. Could you ask Dan Ar Bras or Alain Stivell if they would kindly consider to write a few words for the ooklet? I will keep in touch with you as things progress The working title is "MacTrevor The Magnificent" on the Epona label ( it has a website) all the very best to you

NDLR : Nous conseillons vivement, après l'avoir fait, de lire le livre de Chris Joe Beard, Taking the Purple, téléchargeable sur Amazon et où la vie de Trevor Crozier est largement évoquée. Lien

Callum Allan (The Clutha) : Trevor did stay with me for a few months and during that I was able to get him several bookings in folk clubs around the Glasgow area which went down well with the audiences. I also managed to fix up a few bookings with the BBC in their morning shows and again the style of songs he did and the sea shanties in particular were of interest to the programme producers. Unfortunately I don't have any photos but Trevor was extremely popular with the other members of the group I played with which is The Clutha and we all spent a lot of time with him (...) I was told that he died in a motor cycle accident in Malawi. He also taught my daughter in law mathematics in Malawi which I found out a couple of years ago which was quite a surprise.
He was quite a remarkable and charismatic individual !

Maddy Prior (Folk Roots, n° 144, juin 1995) :

Photo : Bryan Ledgard (Creative commons)

Richard Howkins (Irish Bluegrass Music Club Newsletter, Dublin):  

I saw quite a lot of Trevor for two or three years.

He was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, and I was a very junior member of the staff of the history department. I was trying to become more organised and more 'respectable', and Trevor's company was not always a help in these directions. But my main memory of him is of his bonhomie.

He was nearly always cheerful and enthusiastic. I can only remember two occasions on which he was irate: one was at a party in Dublin, at which Trevor had sung a traditional song from Cornwall.Someone else at the party said disparagingly that that music was not virile enough. Trevor was, I think, more incensed at this insult to the music he loved than he would have been if his own virility had been impugned.

The other occasion was also at a musical gathering in Dublin - it may even have been at the same party. Anyway, Trevor was leading the halyard shanty 'Blood red roses' (with the words used by A.L. Lloyd in the film Moby Dick, some of which I gather may have been Lloyd's own invention). Anyhow, it's a powerful shanty if the choruses are sung with strong voices and good timing. Enough people were singing - I was one - but Trevor wasn't satisfied: when we came in with 'Go down, you blood red roses' he let out an anguished growl of 'Sing, you bastards!' I'm sure we were doing our best, but as far as Trevor was concerned we weren't shifting that halyard.

 

We played, of course, the 'House of David blues'. We must have played several similar songs as well, because Jake Harries said he began to have nightmares about that chord sequence. Jake fought back, however, by composing an autoharp instrumental, based on 'Victory rag', which modulated through several keys. He called it 'Pyrrhic victory rag'.

We also played songs from the earliest albums by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and the one album by the Even Dozen Jug Band - 'Washington at Valley Forge', 'Jug band music', 'Ukulele lady', 'On the road again', and the like. We also played an instrumental version of the 1928 song 'Sweet Lorraine', which had become a jazz standard. I believe Trevor played the lead on kazoo. I have a special reason for remembering this number, as my role on stage was to stand on my head while it was being played. As the song reached its last lines my legs would begin to wobble, and at the end I'd collapse on to the stage and have to be dragged off by the rest of the band.

We took part in one concert at Trinity College Dublin, with several other acts on the bill. We played just before the main artist, the renowned Irish traditional singer Joe Heaney. He sternly reminded the audience that what we had been playing was not folk music but pop music - which was, of course, quite true.

BBC Radio: "Then there was West Country Boy, Trevor Crozier, who played medieval instruments and wrote that wonderful song, The Piddletrenthide Jug Band, and whose album cover showed him in Edwardian gentleman's dress riding a penny-farthing. The album was called Trouble Over Bridgewater."

Dave Goulder : "I knew Trevor Crozier very well, of course, but did not spend much time in his company. We met at festival etc. but only when recording The Raven and the Crow did I stay in his house in London where he lived with Annie, hi musician whife who played in his Brocken consort along with Brian Cooper. Brian and I were in touch again for a few years before, sadly, he died a couple of years ago..."

Rob : "Trevor, who was best man at my brother's wedding, used to joke that the "Broken Consort" referred to his wife Annie."

Sheila : I've (only!) heard him live, in Edinburgh in the 60s...

Greg Stephens : "Trevor Crozier, of blessed memory. A great singer, and a very funny man."

Don't recall seeing a Trevor Crozier thread before, so here's a good point for a tribute. Obviously you musical appreciation builds up from a lifetime of little incidents. But in my own case one stands out: hearing Trevor sing "Searching for Lambs", a very very long time ago, cemented into my soul a lifelong worship of traditional English song which has lasted unshably and made my life a load more fun than it otherwise might have been.
He also told me a joke (or rather showed me, it was mainly visual) a magnicently hilarious joke of insurmountable vulgarity, whose very essence was the crudest racism and sexism: so offensive that I have been very hard put in the last forty years to find any company in which I could legitimately pass it on. Trevor was a one-off.

Nemesis : I gave birth to my son on 3/11/89 on a carpet that I subsequently gave to Trevor Crozier, folk musician, who's birthday is also the 3 October.

Herga Kitty : Trevor Crozier was also responsible for "The day the Piddletrenthide Jug Band hit the charts". Packie Byrne sang this at his booking at the Herga club in September, when he recollected that Trevor had emigrated to the Antipodes and died in a riding accident.

Scrump : In my opinion, Adge Cutler and The Wurzels, Shag Connors & The Carrot Crunchers, and Cyril Tawney preceded Messrs Lakeman and Knightley (good as the are) in giving back the West Country its roots and its pride. The Lakemans (or should that be Lakemen?) and SOH are simply continuing the tradition - good luck to them. I could have included Brenda Wootton, Tony Rose and the Yetties as having participated in "giving back the West Country its roots and its pride" along with the others I mentioned. I'd like to add Trevor Crozier too - and before anyone objects, I know he was born in Hants too. But he did a lot for west country music too.

Dave Sutherland : "Oddly enough the late Trevor Crozier used to say that there was a North Eastern version of "Tavistock Goosey Fair". It was pretty much the same all the way through except the last line which was "we had to traipse home four hundred and thirty miles..."

Jim O'Reilly :  "We knew Trevor when he lived in Dublin. I wasn't aware he had died. He and Tomm Munnelly were very good friends..."

Brian Trench : "I graduated from keyboards to washboard in the House of David Jug Band. A couple of albums by Bob Muldaur, probably belonging to fellow-Trinity College student Trevor Crozier, were the inspiration for this short-lived line-up. We played support to South African folk singer Nadia Cattouse and, in Belfast, to Alexis Korner, the gravelly- voiced pioneer of blues and R&B in England. (By some strange tragic twist, as I was recalling those events and Trevor Crozier for the first time in very many years, news reached me that Trevor was killed in a road accident in Malawi in November 1994.)" 

My Generation, P. 290, 1996, Dublin, Ireland : Lilliput Press

Cormac Gillespie : Dublin was going through `The Ballad Revolution` around that time, mainly centred in O` Donoghue`s pub where the Dubliners and the Furies gathered. There was magic in the air every night and Trevor added his own exotic spice to to the goings on. My friends still speak of his rendition of `Sammy`s Bar`. He was accompanied at the time by a beautiful girl with amber hair who sang that great Irish ballad `The Singing Bird` which knocked us all clean out. (Sinéad O Connor sings a beautiful version of it-utube.) We used to range the city far and wide trying to track down where Trevor and Marjory??? may have been playing at any time. Are you talking in the past tense about Trevor?

Encyclopedia of Popular Music : "A talented multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, Crozier is also widely adored for his charming, unaffected individuality. Raised in Cornwall and Africa, he trained at Plymouth and Dublin, before following his interest ..."